As a nation state, Italy has emerged only in 1871. Until then the country was politically divided into a large number of independant cities, provinces and islands. The currently available evidences point out to a dominant Etruscan, Greek and Roman cultural influence on today's Italians.

My grandmother would always make Fried Dough for the family at a pre-Christmas feast. However, we referred to it phonetically as "GRU-sta-lee". I am trying to find out where this comes from. It has to be a dialect for something but certainly not Zeppoli as it sounds way too different right? Any ideas/thoughts? Anyone heard this term?

Well, this looks like it's making me download a file which I cannot do from here. I also Googled the word "crostelle" but didn't come up with anything. Can you cut and past the text of what's in the link? I'm on the edge of my seat because this looks like something that could be "dialected" for lack of a better word, into "GRU-sta-lee."

That's great thanks! It's interesting because this has to be the term from which it is derived, but what's interesting is that what we refer to as this, is actually not this exact food. Ours is more on the order of Zeppoli or Funnel Cake (softer dough once cooked...not hard and crispy).

Another couple family

"da-DA-lay" which are round and hard and flavored with a bit of anise. AGain, I am sure this is some bastardization of something.

"sca-LEE-lee" which are hard twists of dough coated in honey.

It's actually fun discussing this as a nice change of pace from the name/family aspect of genealogy. It's almost a family tree of food and dialects. My apologies for butchering the language. On a side note, I took a couple of semesters of Italian and when trying to speak it properly, nobody in my family could understand me: